“Wild Coho, adult,” shouts Aaron. The salmon fights him as he carefully moves it from the live-well and releases it back into the river. It’s a sunny autumn afternoon, the air is crisp. “Hatchery, Coho, adult,” he yells again. This salmon’s fate is not as positive as the previous. It wriggles and splashes as he skilfully wrestles it into a large fishing net. It’s swiftly transferred to an industrial-sized blue cooler where its gills are slit and it’s submerged into slush ice. The fish continues to splash momentarily in the icy water as it takes its last few breaths.

I’m down on the Washington State-side of the Columbia River near Cathlamet. I’d heard about an intriguing new type of fishing gear being trialled as a method to aid in the recovery of declining salmon stocks here in the Pacific Northwest. It’s called a Pound Net, and it’s not new at all, and what’s more, it’s currently illegal. This Pound Net is a modernised version of a trap utilised by Indigenous peoples and European settlers of the area many years ago, and it has been outlawed in Washington State for almost 90 years. When European settlers arrived in the Pacific Northwest, they were keen to exploit the region’s natural resources such as gold, animal pelts, timber, and of course salmon. This was during a time when there were no restrictions on which fish or how many could be caught. What’s more, is that there were no laws that protected the environment from being altered and exploited for its resources like the damming of rivers or harvesting timber.

The settlers adopted the Pound Net, and other traps like it, from local Indigenous peoples and altered it to catch as many fish as they could, with some traps hauling in upwards of 40,000 fish in a single take. Local gillnetters were also trying to make a living by fishing for salmon and were in steep competition with the canneries, which owned most of these fish traps along the Columbia River. As this area developed, large swaths of forest were clear-cut for timber, hydroelectric dams were erected to power cities, and more and more fish were harvested and processed through various means to keep up with the ever-increasing demand. This put immense pressure on the environment and wild salmon. When fish stocks began to decline, gillnetters blamed the fish traps for the diminishing salmon populations, and in 1934, fish traps were banned in Oregon and Washington State. However, despite the ban, salmon runs continued to suffer from ongoing pressures from overfishing, dams, and habitat destruction.

Wild salmon were at risk of being lost due to over-exploitation and a thriving fishing industry was soon to follow but no one could pinpoint one glaring issue. What could be done? The answer: Just make more. The implementation of salmon hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest came about in the 1880’s. The goal was quite simple; establishing a hatchery would supplement weak, unstable, or endangered runs and mitigate for habitat destruction. For example, the construction of a dam would knowingly block access to vital upstream spawning habitat for migrating wild salmon, causing a population decline or crash. By establishing a hatchery on this river, you could augment the crashing number of wild salmon by simply rearing more on land and releasing them back into the system. It seemed sensible.